


Fermata

by Domenika Marzione (domarzione)



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Captain America: The Winter Soldier Spoilers, Gen, Missing Scene
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-09
Updated: 2014-04-09
Packaged: 2018-01-18 17:33:38
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 898
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1436842
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/domarzione/pseuds/Domenika%20Marzione
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Natasha Romanova and Nick Fury: two wounded warriors and their wars, past and present.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Fermata

The nurses threw Steve and Sam out of the room immediately, despite the former insisting that he needed to be there and the latter that he was a PJ with EMT certification that hadn't lapsed yet and could be of use. But the nurses, Gretel and Malik, had been dealing with Nick for the last few days and were thus unimpressed by whatever Captain America and Sergeant Wilson could throw at them. 

If Steve had really wanted to, he could have gotten them to let him stay. Captain America was really hard to deny if he put his mind to it, but Natasha very carefully didn't give him any indication that she needed him there, needed a friendly face as the world got fuzzy and the pain got harder to ignore. She was grateful that he didn't know her well enough to see that she did, in fact, but couldn't ask for it, couldn't allow that display of weakness. The Black Widow had done her own wound treatment in the past, had stuck fingers too slick with blood into her own flesh, had done crooked sutures without so much as a topical anaesthetic, and she did not need comfort. 

Gretel took off her jacket with brisk efficiency and then her shirt, handing both to Malik so that he could lay them flat and see how much fabric was missing, how much had to be fished out of her shoulder along with the bullet. She watched Malik find her vein, the prick of the needle lost in the greater sea of pain, and then let herself drift. She wasn't in danger here, didn't need to stay awake, and so she didn't. 

When she woke again, the lights were dimmed and there was a heavy blanket over her and Nick was sitting in the recliner off to the side. 

"You supposed to be up?" She asked, the words coming out sloppy and sticky but clear enough to be understood. 

"Are you?" he retorted with a frown as he looked up from the tablet he had been reading. He looked pretty good for all that he'd been through, but, she realized, she didn't even know how much that was. She'd gotten a litany from the doctor earlier, but had only heard half of it. "Rogers and Wilson gave me quite the story while you were napping."

Because that was how they worked, showing no softness with words or deeds except where it was hard to see. Plausible deniability in all things. 

"Barnes?" she asked, mostly rhetorically, since it was the most ridiculous part of a completely ridiculous series of events. "Do you buy it?" 

She'd been unwilling to fight Steve about it, but it had seemed both implausible and unlikely that his oldest friend had turned up as a golem in service to HYDRA. Which didn't make it untrue, not in this time of aliens and super-soldiers dug out of the ice. The Winter Soldier was already the aggregate of implausible and unlikely tales, what was one more to add to the collection? 

"I could," Nick admitted sadly. The sadness surprised her a little. "Zola pumped Barnes full of all sorts of shit trying to recreate Erskine's work; we've known that since 1943. We pulled Rogers out of the ice alive because of what was in his veins, why couldn't the other side have grabbed Barnes for the same reason?"

Nick had a love/hate relationship with history, the realist knowing it was written by the victor warring with the memory of the little boy whose love of those stories had led him to a life of hard service. She had watched him fight this little conflict with bemusement -- Steve could flummox him still -- and a little bit of envy. She had chosen to cast off her past and live without any history, which was impossible and, frequently, painful in the attempt. 

"Could the other side have been Department X?" she asked, the fearful note in her voice to be blamed on the drugs still in her system. They were already wearing off, the pain returning slowly like a tide coming in, but she grimaced not at the way her shoulder throbbed, instead at how needy for reassurance she sounded. "He speaks Russian and uses Soviet equipment..." 

It was something she'd wondered at their first encounter -- her own memories of the Red Room were fractured and incomplete -- but it had quickly become irrelevant after he'd perforated her intestines with a bullet meant for another. 

"Could've been," Nick agreed, ignoring her weakness with a kindness that was almost worse. "Operation Paperclip went both ways. We got Zola, but Uncle Joe got enough people who would've known Barnes by sight. But considering the events of the last few days, I'm not ready to call long-distance to assign blame." 

There were voices outside the room, indistinct but not urgent, and they faded without ever resolving into clarity. 

"What do we do now?" she asked, putting enough force into her words to make it clear she was requesting orders and not salvation. 

"We take back what's ours," Nick answered firmly, but then his voice softened just a little. "But first we rest. Our resolve will not be enough if our bodies falter. We're going to have one shot at this, no more, and I do not want to imagine what might happen if we fail."


End file.
